Emerson and Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero

Notes

NOTES PROLOGUE 1. Hedge, “Reminisces of Emerson,” 96. 2. Buell, Emerson, 13. 3. Gougeon, “Looking Backwards,” 50; Buell, Emerson, 48. 4. Myerson, Historical Guide, 3. 5. The term comes from Henry Steele Commager’s classic work, The Era of Reform. 6. Thoreau, Walden, 62. 7. Ibid., 25, 62, 4, 5. 8. Emerson, CW 1:53. 9. Ibid., 1:65. 10. Emerson, AW 20, “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844). 11. Emerson, CW 2:29. 12. Emerson, CW 1:88. 13. Ibid., 1:7, Nature (1836). 14. Ibid., 1:77. 15. Miller, The Transcendentalists, 2. 16. Emerson, CW 1:43. 17. Ibid., 1:53, 65. 18. Emerson, JMN 4:357. 19. Emerson, CW 1:69. 20. New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, 132. 21. Emerson, CW 9:210. 22. Ibid., 6:149. 23. Ibid., 1:62, American Scholar. 24. Ibid., 1:42, Nature; 3:5, 17, The Poet. 25. Carl Jung, who provided much of the theoretical foundation on which these others built, kept Emerson’s writings on hand in his library and refers to Emerson’s thought as well as his personality from time to 199 time in his published works. Sometimes the overlap in sources utilized by Emerson and Jung is especially notable. Thus, in his study Psychology and Religion: West and East, when speaking of the ancient use of the circle as a symbol of the Deity, Jung quotes Augustine’s definition of God as “an intellectual figure whose centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” He goes on to note: “A man as introverted and introspective as Emerson could hardly fail to touch the same idea and likewise quote St. Augustine.” In his footnote, he references Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” which was apparently one of his favorites, and, as we shall see, a seminal statement of Emerson’s philosophy (Psychology and Religion, 53). As noted in the epilogue here, Jung’s initial interest in Emerson may very well derive from his friendship with and admiration for William James, whose writings are frequently cited in his works. James himself was strongly influenced by Emerson, a person whom he deeply admired. Joseph Campbell was also an admirer of Emerson, as his most recent biographer attests. Stephen Larsen relates that while filming a lecture series late in life, Campbell became somewhat out of sorts. A companion attempted to calm him down a bit by talking about the death of his own father, who had recently passed away. In the process of doing so, he quoted something from Emerson about the death of a man’s father. The response, as reported, was rather dramatic. “Joe [Campbell] just stopped in his tracks and said, ‘Yes, Emerson is one of the few Americans who got it! He was a transcendentalist, and as my friend Durkheim said, ‘myth can only be understood when one is transparent to the transcendent’. . . . He loved that little wordplay, that little connection with the Transcendentalists . The situation was resolved and we went on” (547). Like these others, Mircea Eliade had a strong attraction to Emerson . His personal journals show that he not only read Emerson carefully, but also transcribed with fair frequency passages from Emerson, which, as he once declared, “fascinate me” (Eliade, Journal V, 29). Additionally, while Norman O. Brown does not cite Emerson specifically in his works, he certainly was familiar with American Transcendental writing, and he quotes Thoreau occasionally in Life Against Death, citing both Walden and the lesser-known A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Life, 255, 308). Also, a fair number of critics have noted a distinct Emersonian quality in Brown’s major works. Martin Green, for example, in his review of Brown’s Love’s Body, observes that the work is “a modern Thus Spake Zarathrustra,” which places Brown in “a major line of 19thand 20th-century prophets, Nietzsche, Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, [and] oddest of all, Emerson.” Green concludes his review with the statement that “Emerson would have understood Professor Brown, and so would Whitman” (Green, 23). Other critics and biographers, like Gay Wilson Allen, have observed that “Emerson anticipated later psychologists of the unconscious (Freud) 200 Notes to Prologue or the subconscious (Jung)” (Allen, Waldo, xi). A number of others have also made similar connections among Emerson, Jung, Freud, and Brown. For example, Gloria Young, in her essay, “‘The Fountainhead of All Forms’: Poetry and the Unconscious in Emerson...